POETRY CENTER FESTIVAL
April 23, 2022
The Poetry Center at PCCC is presenting a one-day poetry festival on Saturday, April 23, 2022. It will be held at the Poetry Center’s home in the Hamilton Club building on the PCCC campus.
As part of the Center’s Distinguished Poets Series, this event will have readings by four featured poets. Rosa Alcalá, Jan Beatty, Mahogany Browne and Mark Doty will all read beginning at 1 PM and should end by 3 PM.
The reading is free and open to the public. In order to properly plan for this event, please register by sending an email to Smita Desai at the Poetry Center.
Jan Beatty will also be offering a workshop as part of the Festival prior to the readings from 10 AM - noon. (see registration details below).
Photo by Margarita Mejiia
Rosa Alcalá
Rosa Alcalá is the author of three books of poetry, most recently MyOTHER TONGUE (Futurepoem, 2017). Alcalá’s poems have appeared in The Nation and American Poetry Review, among other journals, and are included in numerous anthologies, such as Best American Poetry (Scribner 2019 & 2021); American Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement, edited by Claudia Rankine and Michael Dowdy (Wesleyan UP, 2018); and The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them by Stephanie Burt (Harvard UP, 2016). The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, and runner-up for a PEN Translation Award, she is the editor and co-translator of New & Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña (Kelsey Street Press, 2018). She is currently Chair of the Department of Creative Writing and Bilingual MFA Program at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Jan Beatty
Jan Beatty’s sixth book, The Body Wars, was published in 2020 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. In the New York Times, Naomi Shihab Nye said: Jan Beatty’s new poems in “The Body Wars” shimmer with luminous connection, travel a big life and grand map of encounters. Beatty won the Red Hen Nonfiction Award for her memoir, American Bastard, 2021. A chapbook, Skydog, is forthcoming from Lefty Blondie Press. Other books include Jackknife: New and Selected Poems (Paterson Prize), The Switching/Yard, Red Sugar, Boneshaker, Mad River (Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize). For many years, Beatty worked as a waitress, an abortion counselor, and in maximum security prisons. For fifteen years, she directed creative writing and the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops at Carlow University.
Mark Doty
Mark Doty is the author of nine books of poetry, including Deep Lane, Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which won the 2008 National Book Award, and My Alexandria, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the T.S. Eliot Prize in the UK. He is also the author of four memoirs: The New York Times-bestselling What Is the Grass, Dog Years, Firebird, and Heaven’s Coast, as well as a book about craft and criticism, The Art of Description: World Into Word. Doty has received two NEA fellowships, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Award, and the Witter Byner Prize.
Mahogany Brown
Mahogany L. Browne, selected as Kennedy Center’s Next 50, is the Executive Director of JustMedia, a media literacy initiative with a focus on the criminal legal system, and is informed by her career as a writer, organizer, & educator. Browne has received fellowships from Art for Justice Fund, Air Serenbe, Cave Canem, Poets House, Mellon Research & Rauschenberg. She is the author of recent works: Vinyl Moon, Chlorine Sky, Woke: A Young Poets Call to Justice, Woke Baby, Black Girl Magic & book-length poem: I Remember Death By Its Proximity to What I Love. She is the founder of Woke Baby Book Fair, a traveling diverse reading campaign, and is the first-ever poet-in-residence at the Lincoln Center and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
